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February 28, 2011
Charlie Sheen on Good Morning America (he has tiger blood running through his veins) [via]
Tracking the biggest losers in Google's content farm algorithm changes (love the hand-wringing in the comments)
The economics of indie writers in the Kindle Marketplace (also, how indie successes are shifting the culture of openness)
Antimatière (experimental gameplay navigating a 3D world turned 2D)
Gina Trapani runs the numbers on ThinkUp's first year (an amazing community working on an amazing project)
Peter Weller on the RoboCop status in Detroit (first Kickstarter project officially endorsed by RoboCop)
February 25, 2011
Inside a Star-Filled Sky (recursive game by Passage/Sleep Is Death creator Jason Rohrer)
Pattern, a Python module for mining web data (mining popular services, language parsing, and dataviz in one handy bundle) [via]
Turtlecalls.com ("the copycats may be cheaper but they barely even sound like real turtles")
February 20, 2011
CHARM DOG on Twitter (see more Twitter artists) [via]
February 17, 2011
How DJ Stolen blackmailed shoutouts from Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and others (a young German DJ hacked hundreds of accounts before getting caught; you can still hear the shoutouts here) [via]
Slate crunches the numbers on the Jeopardy archives (when in doubt, respond with "What is Australia?")
February 16, 2011
Scouting NY on the last arcade in Chinatown (first time I'd ever heard of an arcade game with live animals)
Pixelfari, Neven Mrgan's 8-bit Safari (like viewing the web on an Apple II)
February 15, 2011
The King Spits ("stammer time!") [via]
Ars Technica on HBGary's proposed plan to discredit Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald (also: step-by-step details on how Anonymous hacked HBGary)
Molly Lewis' "An Open Letter to Stephen Fry" (Stephen's response)
Dissertation Haiku (distilling years of work into 17 syllables)
How Team EMP won the Socialbot competition (the goal was to write a bot that would convince 500 unsuspecting Twitter users to follow it) [via]
The Great Gatsby for NES (love the backstory) [via]
The Atlantic writer competes for the Most Human award in the Loebner's Turing test (a look at different strategies used by chatbots and confederates to appear human)
IBM's Watson sizes up Ken Jennings before their Jeopardy match (watch day 1 and day 2; here's a statistical breakdown of the first match)
Hulu Plus gets the complete Criterion Collection (150 films available today, more added monthly)
Eye-tracking There Will Be Blood (peeking through the gaze of 11 people)
Manu Sporny open-sources his genetic data (someone forked it on Github and patched some bugs)
Rich Vreeland's "January" (his first game, an experiment in algorithmic music; Rich performed on Kind of Bloop) [via]
February 14, 2011
NintendOscope, Gameboy on an oscilloscope (added to the list of Oscilloscope hacks)
Robocop Valentines (related: Detroit Needs Robocop)
Irina Werning's Back to the Future (like Ze Frank and Erik Kastner's Young Me/Now Me with better production values)
February 12, 2011
Reddit chats with Cleverbot (it's been around since 2009, but the corpus is so huge now, conversations can be uncanny)
February 11, 2011
Kottke shares the first Gawker design (I totally forgot he designed the logo)
Interim Apple Chief Under Fire After Unveiling Grotesque New MacBook ("you need to shave the USB ports every couple days")
Craigslisp (shouldn't that be "craigthlithp"?) [via]
February 10, 2011
Remnants of a Disappearing UI (the fingerprints left on an iPad display after each app) [via]
Stuart McMillen's "St. Matthew Island" ("How big is our island?")
Phantom of the Floppera (Toccata and Fugue in D minor performed on four floppy drives) [via]
Unofficial SXSW Music 2011 torrent now available (free songs from 792 showcasing artists)
Byrne Reese on why MovableType lost to Wordpress (trivia: he says the Huffington Post never paid for MT, which they still use today)
Threatened BBC websites crawled and shared as 1.88GB torrent (the torrent holds 172 websites set for closure)
February 9, 2011
Video: DJ Filetype SWF (Joel Holmberg mixes the background music from different browser tabs)
Clement Valla's Seed Drawings (Mechanical Turk workers copying each other's drawings in a visual game of Telephone)
Johnny Chung Lee's low-cost video chat robot (a lower-tech version of the scone-buying robot, for $500 instead of $15,000)
Twitter Parade (the happiest Twitter visualization ever) [via]
February 8, 2011
2D Boy on World of Goo's iPad launch and sales figures (sold 125k copies in the first month, by far the fastest selling by both units and revenue)
Washington Post's visualization of global weight gain since 1980 (more analysis in the article) [via]
Google releases Translate for iPhone (the Babelfish is near, just need a version that translates constantly)
OkCupid crunches the data on best first-date questions (as always, some incredibly entertaining correlations)
February 7, 2011
Robot orders a scone in a Mountain View coffeeshop ($15,000, cheap) [via]
Feltron 2010 Annual Report (this time, a report on his father's life reconstructed from artifacts) [via]
NBC's Community takes on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (trivia: Community creator Dan Harmon also co-created Channel 101 and Heat Vision and Jack)
Gawker Network launches major redesign (it caters to superfans at the cost of pageviews, quite possibly a good thing; my money's on Rex)
New Yorker's long Scientology expose (incredible reporting, centered on screenwriter Paul Haggis' departure from the "Church")
February 5, 2011
Darryl Cunningham's comic on climate change (previously: Homeopathy, Moon Hoax, and MMR vaccinations)
Ze Frank's Star.me launches private beta (Techcrunch has an interview with Ze and more screenshots)
February 4, 2011
When Should I Visit? (uses Foursquare to learn how to avoid Foursquare users)
xkcd on trochee fixation (don't miss the trochee chart, made with this Search Matrix tool)
Island Survival (Friday Flash fun; also: Cactus' very weird Hot Throttle)
February 3, 2011
Penny Arcade responds to the "Dickwolves" debacle (in case you missed it, here's a good timeline)
The Making of "The Social Network" (93-minute behind-the-scenes film, available free on IMDB) [via]
February 2, 2011
Nick Montfort releases Curveship, new interactive fiction framework (Python framework for world modeling with the ability to interactively change narrative style)
Match.com acquires OkCupid (seriously hoping Christian Rudder continues updating OkTrends; they deleted a critical post from last April)
Robert Sheckley's "The Prize of Peril" (1958 short story that predated The Running Man and predicted reality TV) [via]
February 1, 2011
Everything is a Remix, Part 2 (worth it just for the wall of sequel title frames; I want that as a screensaver)
New York Observer on the "end of blogging" (more like evolution than an end; Clive Thompson nailed it, it's the rise of the long take)
Wired on a Toronto statistician who cracked a lottery ticket system (finding flaws in pseudo-random interactive games designed for print) [via]
NYMag feature on the changing landscape of online porn ("we're living in a grand age of micro-smut, a burgeoning empire of lemonade-stand porn")
Final IPv4 blocks allocated (some context from Jonathan Zittrain)
Google engineers set up sting operation, discover Bing copying results (I can't decide if Bing's move is smart or just sad)